Playboy puts every issue ever made online

David Gomez, 20th May 2011

There’s good news for men who may have thought that large parts of their Playboy magazine collection were lost forever.

According to The Chicago Tribune, Playboy has launched an Internet subscription service Thursday called i.Playboy.com that lets viewers see every single page of every single magazine. Sophisticated perverts can see the first issue nearly 60 years ago that featured Marilyn Monroe or the ones hitting the newsstands today.

“They no longer have to store 57 years — 682 issues — of Playboy under their mattress,” said Jimmy Jellinek, Playboy's chief content officer.

Hilarious Jimmy, technology now makes it much easier to hoard boobie magazines.

Chicago-based Playboy has seen its circulation drop from 3.15 million in 2006 to 1.5 million today and has been trying all sorts of stunts to get readers in recent years. Like the issue that included a set of 3-D glasses to better see a centerfold shot in 3-D; or the one that had Marge Simpson on the cover. At least Marge didn’t have to be airbrushed because she’s all airbrush.

Those were moves that were designed to get the younger crowd, and the online archives are gearing towards getting older readers to come back to the pages of Playboy.

As you may already know, as far as porno goes, Playboy isn’t as good (graphic) as other Internet resources. But the articles have always been pretty damn good. So for those who have bought the magazine in the past for the articles, the online service also has a way to look at the works of such writers as John Updike, Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer just by typing in their names.

Jellinek is confident that people will pay the $8 per month or $60 per year for a service that's “meant to appeal to that sense of collective nostalgia and affinity.” He says the website is “the world's sexiest time machine” and “an anthology of cool” for a magazine he calls “the Mount Rushmore of literary greatness.”

But one industry hater compares Playboy to a beaten down old penny arcade.

“The problem with Playboy is it not only lost its powerful interviews, but it lost its lead,” said Samir Husni, director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi School of Journalism. “This is no longer the 50s and 60s when people talked about the interviews. And who cannot see the girl next door naked in this day and age?”

Husni doesn’t think that the service will do much for the company at all.

“The questions are: `Do I need it? Do I want it? Is it relevant to me?“’ Husni said. “The answer is: `No, no and no.“’

Jellinek acknowledges that the whole thing pretty much an experiment aimed at a niche audience, but he also says the service has value because it offers an exceptional window into America’s perverted past.

“We're not trying to achieve mass scale here and move the needle for the company in a great way,” he said.

So the only question that remains is: do you like your porno in digital or in print? Also when are they going to make something like this for girls?